Eve Arnold photographed the famous and the ordinary – in her own words ‘the poor, the old and the underdog.’ The first woman to join Magnum photography agency as a photojournalist, she captured the sadness and banal in the rich and famous, and the interesting side of ordinary people.
Arnold took portraits without the using artificial light. The Philadelphia-born photographer, who passed away age 99 earlier this year, will be possibly best remembered for her intimate... Read More

With not long to go before Milan Salone del Mobile our inbox is swamped with news on exhibitors at the coveted yearly show. The latest is an interesting competition by drinks giant Heineken who has challenged a group of young designers to create a collaborative nightclub based on the theme changing perspectives.
The 19 designers from Milan, New York, Sao Paulo and Tokyo, chosen from a range of different disciplines, will create a pop-up club at the fair – the conclusion... Read More

How do you define and redefine ‘walled cities’ within the metropolis setting? From physical historical defences to more liminal social boundaries, corporate estates or legislative territories, the impact of these structures is increasingly prevalent.
With this theme in mind, architecture students at London’s Royal College of Art have proposed a series of existing walled cities, in the process generating their own critical approach.
#gallery-7 {
margin: auto;
}
#gallery-7... Read More

Completely hijacked by commercialism, it is difficult to fall in love with anything that references or represents Valentine’s Day but this interactive heart installation in New York’s Times Square put a smile on our faces.
The work of young Danish firm Bjarke Ingels Group, BIG?NYC is a ten feet tall glowing heart sculpture made of 400 transparent LED lit acrylic tubes refracting the lights of Times Square, and creating a cluster of lights around the heart.
‘The heart... Read More

These are images of the BMW pavilion at the Olympic Park, designed by young UK firm Serie Architects for the 2012 London games. The two-story structure will be made of steel with recycled content. The idea is to build it on an elevated site above the Waterworks River – between the Olympic Stadium and the Aquatics Centre – with river water cooling the building before returning the filtered water to the river via the ‘water curtain’ feature.
‘The design... Read More

The car industry is full of contradictions. On the one hand it creates machines that are harming our planet, yet some of the most innovative sustainability thinking takes place behind the the closed doors of some of these companies.
Last month we flew to Japan to visit Honda. Founded in 1948, this is Japan’s third carmaker and the world’s largest producer of motorcycles. It is also one of the leaders when it comes to ecological thinking as we discovered on the trip where... Read More

observations

I attended an art and design foundation course much like the famous Vorkurs run by Josef Albers and László Moholy-Nagy, a year-long requirement for all new Bauhaus students before they could progress to study in a specific workshop. In a similar way to how the Bauhauslers ran the famous art school a century ago, mine was a place that taught experimentation and encouraged abstraction, tasking us to find our own unique solutions. And it happened to be the finest year of my formal education. The specialist art school that proceeded, failed entirely to capture my imagination, lacking the free spirit, the magical weirdness of that original school. So, I left my paints, clay, tools and camera, and took up writing.

As the Bauhaus celebrates 100, a series of publications aim to explore just how enduring the legacy of this modest art school founded in 1919 in the quiet town of Weimar. Some are assessing the impact of the Bauhaus post 1933, when the Nazis forced the final school in Berlin to close, as Bauhauslers emigrated to England and America and beyond. Others have re-published some of the original Bauhaus journals and documents. Together they tell a compelling story of the most famous school of design – a place of collective dialogues, progressive ideology, imagination and creative madness.